


crime is the new law

by choomchoom



Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Continuity Mashup, Leverage AU, M/M, reluctantly having Feelings for your associate who is also a criminal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:42:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23773267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: "I’ll buy you a drink, as long as you don’t complain about how I stole the money,” Jazz greeted.“You did steal the money.”“See, that’s a statement of fact, not a complaint. If you change the subject now, free drink’s still on offer.”*Jazz has just taken over from Chromia as the mastermind of their Robin Hood-esque criminal enterprise, which means that Prowl has to work directly with him now. It's kind of not awful.
Relationships: Background Chromia/Windblade - Relationship, Jazz/Prowl
Comments: 10
Kudos: 59
Collections: Prowl Week





	crime is the new law

**Author's Note:**

> *sees the prowl week law/crime prompt and comes up with a really high-concept leverage au*
> 
> The casting, in case it's not immediately obvious: 
> 
> Sterling: Prowl  
> Nate: Chromia  
> Sophie: Windblade  
> Eliot: Arcee  
> Hardison: Wheeljack  
> Parker: Jazz
> 
> You don't have to have seen Leverage to read this fic! It has all the context you need within.

Prowl would never under pain of death admit it, but he missed Chromia.

She’d been a thorn in his side most of the time, always leaving him to cover her tracks and clean up her messes. It was consistently more beneficial to work with her than not to, but Prowl didn’t like her methods and he didn’t like her “team” and he didn’t like the flaws in the legal system that her presence always seemed to bring to the fore.

But Prowl had known her when she’d been on the police force, and while time, bitterness, and a career shift had changed her, she was still recognizably the person he’d worked with.

When she’d got it in her head to marry Windblade and “retire” (Prowl was certain it wouldn’t last a year, though it wasn’t like he knew anyone who had any context to take that bet), she’d passed the mantle of team leader on to Jazz. It was just him, Arcee, and Wheeljack now, and even though Prowl would grudgingly admit that the new team was efficient, he didn’t like working with them.

More specifically, he didn’t like working with Jazz. Prowl had barely known him when he’d been working under Chromia, but now it seemed like Jazz was calling him every other week to alert him of some new crime that Jazz’s team had exposed and, of course, benefited from in the process.

Prowl glared at his buzzing office comm. The number was unlisted, which at this hour almost certainly meant it was one of Jazz’s burners. Jazz had messaged Prowl his from his personal number just once, right after he’d taken over from Chromia. _If you ever wanted to talk in an unprofessional capacity,_ the message had said. Prowl had spent a lot of time looking at that message, trying to decipher what it might mean.

He didn’t like working with Jazz. Jazz made him feel off-kilter, like he was playing a game he’d never agreed to participate in.

Prowl waited until the buzzer was on its last ring and then answered. “What?”

“Hello to you too, Prowl. I would say I’m surprised you’re at the office this late, but I guess I shouldn’t be, anymore.”

“Pattern recognition is probably a trait shared by all the best thieves,” Prowl said.

“Alright! If you’re gonna be like that, I’ll get straight to business. Senator, embezzlement, make sure you’ve got people at the crystal garden across the street from the Senate building at oh-nine hundred tomorrow. Jackie’ll be sending you all the information you need to make an arrest.”

“I assume that’s all I’m getting until you’ve guaranteed your payday?” Prowl asked.

“Yep! I’m so glad you’ve figured out how this works. It’s only been five years. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Fine.”

“It’s always great working with you, Prowl! Bye!” Jazz hung up before Prowl had time to think up an appropriate rejoinder.

Prowl glared at the comm for a few seconds and then set it aside. Now he had to lay the groundwork to explain the arrest of an unidentified senator without letting his superiors on to the fact that he was working with known, wanted criminals.

That took the rest of his night, and when he ordered a squad to dispatch to the crystal gardens, he was completely prepared to defend his decision, no matter how obvious Jazz’s involvement was.

Prowl didn’t have to go himself. But…Jazz had said _see you tomorrow._ Jazz was expecting him, and Prowl didn’t want to discover the consequences of failing to meet Jazz’s expectations.

The scene at the gardens was about as expected. Senator Starscream was there, meeting with someone unfamiliar to Prowl. When he saw the police, Starscream bolted to his feet, stumbling backwards into Arcee, who caught his shoulders and grinned at him when he turned his glare on her.

Starscream tried to flee when he saw Jazz and Wheeljack suddenly standing behind the mech he’d been meeting with, but an EMP from one of Prowl’s officers brought him back down before he got more than a few meters in the air.

Prowl was watching his officers truss Starscream up in handcuffs when Jazz sidled up to him, standing close enough that Prowl could feel the pride in Jazz’s EM field against his sensors. “Did you recharge at all last night?” Jazz asked, instead of saying anything normal or professional or relevant.

“You gave me half a night to organize the arrest of a _senator_ with almost no information to explain it,” Prowl replied. Wheeljack’s documents proving Starscream’s illicit use of what turned out to be shocking amounts of tax money had hit his inbox at 0900 exactly. “When would I have recharged?”

“You gotta take better care of yourself, Prowl.” Jazz sounded completely sincere. Prowl glared.

“What, you don’t want to have to find another cop who would lower themselves to working with you?”

Jazz laughed. “I could get someone else from the force on our side easily. Either convince them of the moral rightness of what we’re doing, or offer to cut them in on the profits. But I like working with you.”

“Why?” Prowl shouldn’t have asked that. He had no reason to ask, outside of his own curiosity.

In response, Jazz smiled. “I just do.”

* * *

“You’re just about the last person I expected to hear from,” Chromia said, her voice threaded with amusement. She’d picked up her comm quickly enough, though.

“I wanted to talk to you about Jazz,” Prowl said. Unlike Jazz, straightforwardness usually worked for talking to Chromia.

Chromia actually giggled. _“Babe, what’s up_?” Prowl heard from the background.

“Nothing, darling, Prowl just wants to talk about Jazz.” Her voice was loaded with something unidentifiable, and that plus Windblade’s answering laugh were almost enough to make Prowl hang up.

“If you’re quite done…” Prowl said instead. He really did want her advice.

“Okay, okay, sorry. “What about Jazz did you want to talk about?”

Now that Chromia had asked him directly, Prowl couldn’t quite come up with what his question was.

She sighed. “Just tell me.”

“I just don’t like working with him,” Prowl said. “Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t like working with _your_ whole setup either, but with him it’s…different.”

“Different how?” she asked. Chromia had never seemed to enjoy being a sounding board to help Prowl to talk things through, but she was better at it than pretty much anyone else he knew.

“I just feel like he wants something from me. Not approval of his “work”, or anything like that but…something.”

“What makes you think that?” Chromia asked.

“He’s always asking personal questions and…trying to have conversations and…” When he said it out loud, it sounded a lot more ridiculous than it had felt before.

“How does it feel, talking to him?”

Prowl was silent.

“Good?”

“Shut up.” 

“ _You_ called _me_.”

“ _Fine_. Yes. Talking to him isn’t torturous.”

“And, to be clear, that’s your baseline? Most conversations are torturous?”

“You know me.”

“Yeah, I do.” Chromia’s voice had gone soft. It sounded like the way she talked to her team. “Well, I’ll tell you something, and you can do what you want with it. Jazz likes you. He likes working with you and he likes being around you and he likes hearing what you have to say. I know it might not be easy to see that, because you’re very hard to like. But, that’s what’s up with Jazz.”

“Hm.”

“Like I said, do what you want with it.”

“Thank you,” Prowl said. “Enjoy your honeymoon.”

 _“He just said thank you_ , _”_ he heard Chromia say to Windblade in the background before he hung up.

Prowl sighed and flipped through his messages until he found a familiar one from months ago, which he’d lingered over even after he’d memorized it. _If you ever wanted to talk in an unprofessional capacity._

Before he could talk himself out of it, he responded. _Let’s meet._

_Unprofessionally?_

_Of course._

* * *

Jazz picked an oilhouse not far from the precinct – not the one Jazz’s team was operating out of, to Prowl’s surprise. He supposed it might be a sign of goodwill, Jazz’s willingness to meet him in neutral territory.

Jazz looked nice when he showed up right on time, a few minutes after Prowl. He’d clearly put on fresh polish since this morning, as if this was. Well. A date.

Prowl was surprised, but found himself not wanting to dissuade the notion.

“I’ll buy you a drink, as long as you don’t complain about how I stole the money,” Jazz greeted.

“You did steal the money.”

“See, that’s a statement of fact, not a complaint. If you change the subject now, free drink’s still on offer.”

“Okay,” Prowl said. He wracked his processor for a subject that wasn’t Jazz’s source of income or Jazz’s practically sparkling paint and came up with, “Why deal with Starscream _now_? He’d been working with some of your previous targets. He’s exactly up your alley.”

“Windblade wouldn’t let us,” Jazz said, communicating with the bartender in hand signals as he did. The bartender brought them over two cubes of something fizzing. “They had a, you know, a something. But she’s off-planet now and he was getting too complacent. He’ll lose his position, pay a fine, and hopefully learn a little something. Windblade will have to deal with it, if she and Chromia ever even come back to Cybertron.”

“You don’t think they will?” Prowl asked. He tried the drink. The fizz complicated the taste, making each component more interesting to dissect out. It wasn’t something he would have ordered for himself, but he liked it.

Jazz smiled at something. “I think retirement suits them. I think they’re ready for it. But who knows? Maybe it’ll just turn out to be a long vacation.”

“I think they’re going to get bored,” Prowl said. He took another sip of his drink. “I give it a year.”

“You want to take that bet?” Jazz asked. “Or is betting against stolen money too far outside the bounds of the law?”

“I think I will take it,” Prowl said. By way of explanation, he added, “I don’t lose bets.”

“Done,” Jazz said, raising his cube to clink it with Prowl’s. “I guess that means you’re stuck with me for another year.”

That prospect, voiced by Jazz, was much more appealing that Prowl had expected. “I suppose it does.”

**Author's Note:**

> I had a lot of fun casting other leverage AUs with folks on [twitter](https://twitter.com/SciFiWithSwords/status/1252594719621775362) this morning! i went with this cast because my goal was a short prowl-centric fic


End file.
